The gameplay looks like it came from the same box of cake mix as Deus Ex: Human Revolution (even down to large objects only movable with a skill), with a Bio/System Shock fondant exterior. Points for your office code being 0451, nice shout-out to DX1 fans. Nothing looks totally mind-blowingly unique in the first hour, but there's lots of good elements that seem like they should add up to at least an acceptable whole. How tuned the systems are and how well they work together remains to be seen, but there's only so many of these first person action-RPGs and this one's already checking a lot of boxes for me.

This game really hits the Goldilocks zone for circuit racing, there's a detailed enough physics system underlying it to make for a solid sim, but assists and difficulty settings can make it as forgiving as you need. It also doesn't slip too far into the arcade-y NFS feel, where grip and traction aren't forces you have to wrestle with, where you can hurl yourself into almost any turn at high speed and expect to come out fine. Cars feel different, like they have weight and are interacting with varied surfaces, and the tracks are interesting and different without being confusingly over-complicated.

I'm really on the fence about this one being an issue, even as an audiophile (bona fides: my audio setup is worth more than my computer and projector setup combined, and I've worked professional sound on a Sundance-award-winning short film among many others). It's kind of like car audio: the environment has more of an effect on your listening experience than what the drivers can put out, and any difference in quality but the most severe will be drowned out by the ambience. Bluetooth is already the universal standard in phone audio, even reaching to the bottom of the range. If you're the kind of person who buys brand new phones shortly after release, you've already got Bluetooth headsets and speakers. And if you can tell the difference between 320KBps MP3 and FLAC/WAV, your monitor speakers are on Auralex pads and your walls are covered in spiky acoustic foam.

Where'd they get that list of hard drive sizes, 2009? Can you even buy a new HD that's 99GB or less, and why would you? Windows + Steam + a AAA 2016 game = full.

I hope they enjoy the 990-ish characters I crammed into those text boxes, and with only 60% of their RDA of sarcasm per paragraph!

They called it out in a recent Silicon Valley episode: you can't just let a bunch of engineers who think like you try the product, you have to let some real humans, even some of the mouth-breather distinction, have a crack at it. One of my favorite examples: in one of the Win10 betas, the actually-installing-Windows part of the process had "Setup" used four different ways (eg "Setting up" "Configuring setup") for stages of the same 0-100% progress screen. Maybe it meant something different to the engineers who coded it, but it was somewhere between meaningless and frustratingly obtuse to any end user.

It would make sense to have a rubbery coating on his daily use aug hands, something with give and texture to allow him to grab slippery, hard non-porous, or fragile objects. I can't imagine they'd try to have fingers for grasping made purely of smooth polished carbon fiber; otherwise, when Adam Jensen makes an omelette, he breaks a lot of eggs.

That said, I agree that the sound pulled me out of the cutscene, I expected at least something different than the same mirror/glass wipe sound we've heard in a thousand movies. I would have liked to see a twist on the first game, like Jensen going to break his mirror and his malfunctioning aug arm twitching and just bouncing off the glass.

I had the same reaction, didn't expect much but found myself surprisingly engaged by the game. Maybe because it feels like an ARPG with a cover shooter wrapped around it, rather than the other way around, but I find it scratches the RPG/exploration itch far more effectively than the weak-substitute-for-proper-balance ultralight progression systems that have bloomed over the last few years. Simultaneously, the shooter elements are Good Enough™ that I feel my player skill is actually involved, as opposed to RPGs that lay the spreadsheet bones too bare and make me feel like I'm using my heroic powers to command Excel, not the forces of good against injustice and tyranny. Matchmaking is fast and easy, it's been perfectly stable on a modern rig, and devs have been responsive to the community. Not sure how long lv30 will keep everyone entertained and around (it's much more fun in a party) or the quality of the eventual DLC, but for now I'm having a blast.

It hasn't been "Road & Track presents The Need for Speed" in a long, long, long time. Every time they try and shoehorn story into these games it's more and more atrocious, and simultaneously we're seeing immense quality from near zero budget productions on YouTube every minute, so why this lame 90s POV four-CD-ROM-style FMV garbage?

Part of the issue is that these are the "Game Ready" drivers, so especially for those that have paid out the nose for SLI setups, the updates range from slight tweaks to completely necessary to get the game running. I updated for The Division and was getting straight-up restarts until reverting to 361.91 (362.00 has had some issues with GTX 970 clocks). The last few months have had no issues, seems like they're just on a bad streak, and I definitely ran into more problems with AMD's drivers and an R9 280x in my last setup.

For the love of god, yes. Scientists say we're going to hit Peak Superlative within the next twenty years. If we exhaust the giant underground reservoirs of "amazing" and "you won't believe", mostly located miles deep under Greenland and the Mongolian steppes, our children's generation will be limited to lab-created "cool" to express the entire human range of excitement. Please, Buzzfeed wannabees, think of the children!

I did sound on a day of this shoot, in a bit that comes later, and know a bunch of people on the production. I haven't played the game and still have no idea what's going on, even having read that day's sides. I'm definitely intrigued, though, and I'm happy to see this making it out into the wild, a huge amount of work was going into the detailed execution of a well-laid-out plan from what I saw. And if it sounds like I'm being vague, we're under NDA until they release the whole thing.

So after the relatively disappointing sales of AW, they're...doubling down on the silly bombastic technology angle? Thanks, but if I want my SpecOps troops with crazy badass technology, I'll stick with Deus Ex.

I've always wondered about QTEs, because in addition to being silly and pointless on their own, they also nearly always switch up the controls from what you're used to. Make it a different perspective but still using the reflexes and actions we've been honing the rest of the game. For example, the boss swings his big-ass sword along the ground and the game nudges into slo-mo...don't make me hit four random keys, then invert my keyboard and do the Truffle Shuffle in front of my camera, just to jump over the attack. That's not what I spent the last 7 hours of your game learning how to do.

Why have the same rote set of button presses every time? Spend a little animation budget and give some intuitive branching options that follow your actions in the rest of the game. In the scenario above, you could jump to clear the sword, and if you're super bad ass perfectly time a second jump to step on the blade, launching you to a gleaming gem embedded otherwise inaccessibly high in the wall. Or, you could dodge the swing and charge in, using the opportunity to strike a blow to an unarmored flank for extra damage, shortening the boss battle. Failing to dodge doesn't reset the sequence, but instead injures you, temporarily limiting your options and possibly cutting you off from treasures, perfect kills, or stronger attack opportunities. Asking me to memorize a pattern of four-color button presses got old with Simon, and that came out in 1978!